So no one told you it was going to be this way (clap clap clap clap), but it is, apparently: they're talking about reuniting the cast of Friends for a movie. In a strategic move probably quite closely connected to the Sex and the City film and how much lovely money it made for everyone concerned, rumours have started flying that a movie could appear within the next 18 months.

But what's in it for the fans? After 10 seasons of the series everything was tied up neatly - three of them were married (two to each other), there were adopted twins, a house in the country, a call to Hollywood. And the ones you always thought might get together in the end? Ta da! They got together in the end. It was a happy ending with every storyline tied up so tightly you'd need nail scissors to get them undone again. So what can they possibly add to that?

Raiding the TV cupboard for exciting new film ideas isn't a new thing. It's a logical move - if it works well on the small screen, it's got a good plot and lots of people like it, then how much more will they like it when it's 50 times the size and three times as long?

Sex and the City managed to get around this by taking a storyline that could have arced over an entire series and clumsily folding it into one humungous episode instead - but the concept worked, and with lots of pretty dresses thrown in for good measure, the film has struck gold (if gold is fashionable this year, I cannot keep up) at the box office, which will clearly encourage others to try the same.

Sometimes this works better than others. Larger-than-life characters that work so well on a little box in the corner of the room suddenly become unbearable when they're 20ft tall and in close-up. And the simple structure of a problem encountered and solved within half an hour can feel overstretched at four times the length.

In recent years, Hollywood studios have reached to the 60s, 70s and 80s for viable stock - sometimes more viably than others. Charlie's Angels worked well and produced enough posters to keep teenage boys' bedrooms in wallpaper for years to come. Starsky and Hutch was criticised for not taking itself seriously enough, while the remade Miami Vice was scolded for doing just the opposite - though in that case it was director Michael Mann destroying the legacy of his own original series, which was less bad. The Avengers, coy and subtle, camp and clever on television, turned into just another dull action movie in 1998. Lost In Space has similarly been buried at the back of the bargain bin.

With the success of Transformers, many other childhood favourites are heading to a multiplex near you - or straight to video, depending on how they turn out. The forthcoming titles include a Thundercats movie, and Mysterious Cities of Gold. There have been rumours of an A-Team movie for more than a decade - but now it's looking likely sometime in the next few years.

But the pool seems to be getting smaller, because some of the newest announced TV crossovers have barely left the listings before they're being rumoured to run back on stage for a big-screen encore.

There is some good news - a film version of cult screwballish comedy series Arrested Development, widely loved and brought back from the dead when fans lobbied the network in protest at its cancellation on television, appears to be in the pipeline. A film might make (or break) its mainstream reputation.

Once you start looking, you realise that if there's any possibility of making a quick buck off a popular series, it's probably already been done - but there are still some that could be harvested. Admittedly, The Sopranos: The Movie wouldn't be great - especially since most people assume the main rotagonists to have popped it at the end of the last series. A film of beloved series Spaced might work - as long as it was done by Simon Pegg, and curtailed any further talk of a US remake. Perhaps best of all, for the benefit of anyone who doesn't have 120 hours and boundless patience to spare, they could make Lost: The Really Short Clear Movie. Because, frankly, if they could wrap it up and get it over with, it would save a world of television conspiracy theorists an awful lot of time.

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About this article

Anna Pickard on why Hollywood studios keep going to the small screen for ideas

This article appeared on p11 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Thursday 3 July 2008.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 19.01 EDT on Thursday 3 July 2008.
It was last modified at 08.20 EDT on Monday 1 September 2014.
It was first published at 19.04 EDT on Thursday 3 July 2008.